


Bullfrog

by admiralty



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Episode: s05e04 Detour, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Joy to the World, Light Angst, Post-Episode: s11e10 My Struggle IV, all the boys and girls, joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-15 01:03:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18488104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/admiralty/pseuds/admiralty
Summary: "Will I ever think of that song as anything other than his?” he asks her softly. She’s quiet in thought for a moment. He wonders if he’s made her sad. He hadn’t meant to make her sad.





	Bullfrog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissAnneThrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAnneThrope/gifts).



> Prompt: domestic fluff. I don’t typically do fluff without angst creeping in so I tried my best.

 

 

 

 

 

After the dust settles, things go back to normal more quickly than they should. Or, at least, the kind of normal neither of them are very used to. Trauma has been second nature for so long it’s hard to believe the worst is finally behind them.

Mulder has been through all of this before. When he had to let go of Samantha eighteen years ago it was a very similar feeling to the night he stood holding Scully on that dock: a truth that drifted up into starlight much like the weight off his chest. Letting go of their son had been unthinkable, unfathomable really, but it was exactly what they needed to do. It’s time to move ahead, to take a leap of faith forward. Together.

There are moments during every day when they think of him, and wonder if they will ever see him again. But they share these moments with each other now. They do not leave one another in the dark. Instead they reach for the light.

Scully told him _no more darkness._ This time, he listens.

Their new way of thinking starts on a normal evening, dirty dishes in the sink, a candle burned down halfway, a summer breeze drifting through the house while the sun sets. They’re wrapped up into each other on the worn leather couch doing nothing in particular, just holding on and breathing.

Mulder sighs. Scully sighs. The baby kicks.

She inhales sharply. “Did you feel that?” she asks him. He can’t find his voice, so he nods into her neck from behind her, his arms wrapped around her front. It won’t be much longer they can fit on the couch this way.

“Mulder?” she asks again.

“I’m nodding. Wow,” he breathes, fingers drifting along her belly. Memories flood his mind, of Scully’s Georgetown apartment, a light rain outside, slowly untying her robe to rest his gaze upon her pregnant body for the very first time. Then, the feel of a swift kick to his face as he pressed a kiss to her stomach. It should have been a happy moment, but instead both their thoughts at the time turned to all the months of kicks he’d missed.

He tries to stop a sob from breaking free now but fails, covering by burying his face into the back of her neck. But she hears.

“I know what you’re thinking about,” she says. “It’s okay to think about him. But don’t cry, okay? Not this time.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, taking a deep breath.

“Don’t be sorry. I don’t ever want you to be sorry, Mulder,” she says, covering his hands with her own. “I just want you to be happy.”

He marvels at her resilience, what she’s gone through and how she’s still here, still breathing, still able to smile even more than before. He kisses her neck a couple times, breathing in her scent as if the strength radiating off this woman could somehow be airborne. “I am. I’ve never been happier, Scully. It’s just…” he trails off with a sigh of hesitation.

“Just what?” she asks, curious.

He doesn’t want the mood to turn melancholy, but in the moment he opts for honesty. “If you could erase all the bad things from our past, would you?”

She settles her body backwards into him, her sigh mirroring his, only he can tell hers is one of genuine contentment. “No. I wouldn’t, honestly.”

“Wouldn’t change a day, huh?” he asks, smiling. “Not even the Flukeman?”

He knows her well enough by now to feel that she’s smiling. “Not anymore,” she answers. “But I’ll see your Flukeman and raise you one Second Coming Banana Slug.”

He chuckles, having missed that particular X File, and squeezes her tighter, holding his hands firmly against her abdomen. He doesn’t want to miss anything anymore.

“No… I’ll take it all,” she explains, “because it brought us here. Everything, even the terrible things I regret. And there were many.”

“But isn’t that what regret is? Wishing you’d done something differently? That you could take it back?”

She doesn’t pause to think. Clearly she’s thought this through already. “Who’s to say if I did a thing differently anything would have changed? Big things, little things. Who’s to say?”

Thoughts of a conversation on his old Alexandria apartment couch come racing back. The green glow of a fish tank, discussions of roads not traveled. Two cups of tea and a sleepy Scully. A night of clarity for them both. She’s probably right.

“There are some little things I wish I could change, though,” he admits. “Memories that… mean something now I wish they didn’t.”

“Like what?”

He sighs. “Like… when William was just born. And we sang to him. You remember?”

She smiles again. “I do. Of course I do.”

He sees it in his mind, the three of them in her apartment, seventeen years ago. And he hears it in his mind, Three Dog Night spouting forth in the not-so-dulcet tones of his Scully.

 

_“William was a bullfrog….”_

_“Really?” he grins. “That the only one you know?”_

_William’s cries continue as she cradles him in his arms, a piercing noise they’re only getting used to, wondrous and terrifying all at once as baby cries are to all new parents._

_“It worked on you,” she insists. “Was a good friend of mine…” she delivers the melody directly into the infant’s ear, and then Mulder sees it, for just a moment. A reaction. William’s breath hitches and his eyes flicker to Scully, fixed on her face._

_"Never understood a single word he said…”_

_A small sound, a hiccup maybe, then nothing. William stares intently up at his mother, enraptured. Mulder once again feels that jolt coursing through him he’s only just becoming familiar with: the feeling of being a father._

_"But I helped him drink his wine,” she finishes, wide eyed, proudly, the baby completely quiet now. Scully pins Mulder with a familiar ‘told you so’ look and he nods, impressed._

_“Not fair, though,” he says. “All of us Mulder men are entranced by your singing voice.”_

_Her smile is for Mulder but she has eyes only for her son right now, as it should be._

_Mulder reaches for him. “Let me,” he says simply. She does. He takes the infant delicately, carefully, not used to this. He won’t have a chance to get used to this._

_“Joy to the world… all the boys and girls…” he sings._

_Scully drifts to his side, leans her head against his shoulder, exactly where she belongs. She strokes William’s head softly._

_“Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea…” he turns slightly, looking at her. It’s the happiest he’s ever been in his entire life and he can see the same reflected in her eyes. William’s eyes droop as he falls asleep in his father’s arms._

_“...Joy to you and me.”_

 

The memory warms and aches all at once. He shakes his head at what his life seems to have become: a continual series of conflicting emotions. A constant battle, a paradox. He tries to land on the good but it’s not easy.

“Will I ever think of that song as anything other than his?” he asks her softly. She’s quiet in thought for a moment. He wonders if he’s made her sad. He hadn’t meant to make her sad.

“But it wasn’t his, Mulder. It isn’t,” she whispers. “It’s ours.”

It isn’t a disavowal, or a dismissal. It’s only the truth.

He then thinks of another night in the Florida forest, long before William. Long before that kind of heartbreak. They’d ended up wrapped around each other much like they are now, only then they’d been two friends aching for more. A yearning that only hindsight could paint so clearly. It’s a good memory, a hopeful memory.

“You’re right,” he says. “It is ours.” The evening breeze joins their conversation for a brief moment, weaving through their little unremarkable house, and the candle on the coffee table flickers. He closes his eyes, calm. Lets it all in.

“I still remember that night so clearly, Scully,” he says, smiling. “The last thing on the planet you wanted to do was sing, but you did, for me. Only because I asked you to.”

She sighs. “You left me no choice, really.”

“It was pretty awful,” he chuckles, and she pinches his arm. But he feels her smiling.

“Consider it payback for dragging me out into the woods. Yet again.”

“You flirted with me, Scully,” he says. “I remember that too. You never flirted back in all the years I’d known you.”

“What can I say? I’d beaten cancer,” she points out. “It made me braver, I suppose.”

“Braver than me, that’s for sure.”

“But not brave enough.” She turns around to face him and he holds her tightly to keep them both from sliding off the couch. He knows what she means. It took them far too long to admit the truth to each other.

“Brave enough to sing me a love song,” he says.

She scoffs. “It wasn’t a love song, Mulder.”

“It was,” he insists. “It’s _our_ song, Scully. And that makes it a love song.”

She smiles at him. “A love song. About a frog.”

“Exactly.” He leans in for a kiss as her lips curl up into a smile. “Bullfrog,” he corrects her quietly, his lips still pressed against hers. He tries not to think about how ‘bullfrog’ was the nickname they’d given William during the few short days they’d all spent together. After a moment she pulls away to look at him.

“I think that’s the answer, Mulder.”

“What answer?” he murmurs, eager to get back to the kiss.

“Maybe it’s not about erasing painful memories, but… taking them back, you know? For you and me. Finding the light in the darkness. Finding joy. Finding…” she trails off, searching for the right word.

“...Bullfrog?” he grins in answer.

She shifts a bit on the couch and he pulls her into him. His lifeline, his other half. His partner in every possible sense of the word. They haven’t had William in seventeen years, and they haven’t had Jackson either. But they have this new life to look forward to. And they will most certainly always have each other.  

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Bullfrog.”

  


***

 

She trusts in him again completely. She knows deep down the trust never really left, even when they were apart; the trust that somehow they’d find their way back to each other.

Thoughts of that terrible time still persist. She’s been pushing the memories away as they arrive, one after another, pushing away the darkness. But their conversation on the couch has helped her rethink things. She doesn’t need to push away the bad, she only needs to focus on the good.

One evening they lie in bed side by side, staring up through the skylight into the endless starry night. His hand moves to her growing belly and then lower, suggestively, and they roll into each other like an inevitability, no words, bodies and arms and legs tangled in the kind of love only twenty five years of trust and heartache can build.

His other hand cups her face in this practiced dance and his knee parts her legs as he travels down, down, curling under as she begins to quiver next to him. She pulls his lips into hers and drinks him in, his face rough with stubble that’s slowly turning into a beard again.

She pauses, one of those bad memories trying to get in. The beard. The wall he erected between them that led to so much heartache; that eventually led to her departure.

She knows it’s not the same now, not anymore. But she suddenly remembers how it made her feel all those nights he’d pulled away, further and further until he was so far gone she couldn’t see him anymore.

A tear breaks free and he notices. “Scully, what’s wrong? What is it?” He retracts his hand in misunderstanding; the pregnancy has made everything feel different and it wouldn’t be the first time his enthusiasm has led to some unexpected sensation.

“It’s nothing, Mulder, it’s…” she doesn’t want to lie, say she’s fine. Pretend nothing is wrong. They don’t lie to each other anymore. “It’s... bullfrog.”

He stops short, confused for a second, but then understanding crosses his face. He smiles and kisses her again, and she smiles back, and this time she doesn’t feel the beard of the man who broke her heart; she feels the scruff of a man who’s been so busy the past few days tending to her needs he’s forgotten to take care of himself. She smiles back, the tear dried and forgotten, as she lets him tend to her. Her leg hooks over his hip and he makes them one, and her hands go to his face as they move together, eyes locked. Smiling.

_Bullfrog._

  


***

 

After their daughter is born they are truly tested.

Her eyes are Scully’s, just like William’s were. Her nose is Mulder’s, just like William’s was. This time it’s not a passing moment they can paper over with a single word. It’s a constant ache, a dull thudding of two hearts that love this child endlessly but still yearn for another.

Two days home and Mulder stops mid-bite while eating Thai takeout. He sets his chopsticks down and looks at Scully as she paces the kitchen, Lily against her shoulder, bouncing her up and down to calm her cries.

“What is it?” Scully asks, noticing.

“I don’t have to leave,” he says softly. She is confused at first, but then looks at him in understanding. He only had forty eight hours the first time around, when supersoldiers and threats of danger forced him to run. This time, he gets to stay.

“No, you don’t,” she smiles. The bouncing continues but Scully’s eyes are riveted to his, locked on. “Ever again.”

He stands up and moves into her for a kiss that would be best served without the baby between them but he doesn’t care. Lily wails as their lips mark this moment, the moment he stays instead.

A tear falls from Scully’s eye but it’s a happy tear, and those he will never tire of wiping away.

“That is some _serious_ bullfrog,” he grins.

For the first few nights they share baby duties; Mulder changes diapers, Scully nurses. Every few hours it’s the same routine. And so many moments become bullfrog moments, the things Mulder missed the first time around, the things they now get to enjoy and experience together. Every sad remembrance turned new.

After a couple weeks, Lily’s nighttime cries no longer wake Mulder. Scully touches his sleeping face tenderly and rolls out of bed for every feeding, and although he asks every morning why she hadn’t woken him to help, she insists she will the next night.

But she doesn’t, because watching Mulder sleep soundly is a novelty. Much like the child in their lives now, she hasn’t been accustomed to it. In the twenty six years she’s known him, his sleep has been as erratic and restless as his never ending search for truth. Now that he’s found peace she wants him to enjoy the rest. He’s earned it.

One night she wakes for a feeding and settles back into the bed, propped up in the dark. The baby latches and suckles and Scully closes her eyes, dreaming, but dreaming now of her own reality, and how it’s finally exactly what she’s wanted. Every day that passes only proves it’s all not, in fact, too good to be true.

_More than impossible._

For once, Mulder awakens and slowly rolls over in the bed. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he murmurs sleepily, throwing an arm over her thighs, nuzzling his head into to her hip.

“I want you to sleep, Mulder,” she says. “I love watching you sleep.”

“I thought I was the one always watching you sleep,” he mumbles. Then he looks up at her through sleepy eyelids, and she feels the heat of his gaze even in the dark.

“Are you happy, Scully?”

The question comes as a surprise at three in the morning. But she doesn’t have to wonder. “Yes, Mulder, I’m happy. And more than fairly.”

“So… the bullfrog’s helped?” he asks.

“Yes, it has. More than you know,” she replies. They are quiet for a minute, listening to the soft sounds of the baby nursing. Peace, finally.

“I do think there’s one more thing we need to do, that we haven’t done yet,” he says. She knows what he means, and she wants to do it. But she’s afraid.

“I don’t know, Mulder.”

He props himself up into his elbow. “But I do. I know. Remember what you said, Scully? It’s ours. And we should do it together.”

She finds his eyes in the darkness, tiny crescents of light reflecting the stars they can see through the window above. She thinks of all they’ve lost together, but then of all they’ve gained. Her eyes never leaving his, she nods, and he sits up until he’s leaning right next to her. His hand touches their daughter’s head.

“Lily was a bullfrog,” Mulder croons softly. “Was a sweet girl of mine… never understood a single word she said…” He looks at Scully, expectant, and she smiles in acquiescence.

“But I helped her drink her wine,” she sings in response. And his smile lights up the dark room.

“Joy to the world, all the boys and girls...” they sing together softly. “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.”

They sing another verse or two, and after a minute Lily is asleep at her mother’s breast, having given her approval. Mulder leans down to kiss her head, then back up to Scully’s lips. She lives within it for a while, and when they finally part, she knows for certain.

_Joy to you and me._

“ _Ours_ ,” she whispers.

 

**Author's Note:**

> For MissAnneThrope. The original prompt was an MSR marriage proposal but I’ve already [done](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14748734/chapters/34426004) that [twice,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15810795/chapters/38710241) so Lauren kinda gets a two-for one ;)


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